K9 “Robot Gladiators”

OK, so here I am with about five or six episodes left, and this series did two things I wasn’t expecting.

First, for some reason, the episode decides to play off as a take on The Sting.  Now, I enjoyed The Sting quite a bit.  Great little con man comedy with Paul Newman and Robert Redford playing a con on mob boss Robert Shaw.  Memorable piano score.  Breezy feel to it.  Was it popular with Australian kids in 2010?

See, Darius is pulling a con on a creepy guy who runs an underground robot fighting league.  There’s a piano score that sounds kinda like the one from The Sting but only if you know the original’s and it’s not that close.  Even Darius’s wardrobe looks like it might have come from the movie.  Anyway, the plot is to get K9 inside to act like a potential robot gladiator at least until Darius can find the evidence that said sketchy guy is doing bad things.  He eventually brings in Starkey as a “teenage genius” who specializes in fixing robots and Jorjie (the only member of the threesome played by an actual teenager) as a tax investigator of some kind.

So…this sketchy guy, he never stops to think it’s kinda odd that a group of kids are the people he’s dealing with?  Eh, I guess not though he does note Jorjie looks kinda young.  Then again, he’s doing this at the behest of Inspector Thorne.

Now, the rest of the episode is rather rote K9 sort of storytelling.  K9 initially doesn’t think too highly of the other robots, namely a pair of clown robots and a big spiky guy who was built to fight, but he becomes friends with the clowns, so when Spikes busts one of the clowns into a bunch of smaller pieces (he gets better), K9 decides to blow the other guy up when its his turn.

That turns out to be Thorne’s whole plan:  make K9 mad so he’ll blow up Spike Guy because there’s a bomb in Spike Guy that can cause enough damage to K9 to allow Thorne to get K9’s regeneration circuit.

Naturally, the plan doesn’t work, but it does lead to questions.  Notably:  how did Thorne know K9 even has a regeneration circuit and who told him?

Yes, there’s this shadowy figure giving Thorne instructions, so the other thing I wasn’t expecting:  an ongoing plot in the last few episodes.